Eliezer, so long an organism’s fitness depends on interactions between many different base pairs, the effect can be as if some of the base pairs are logically determined by others.
Also, unless I’m mistaken there are some logical operations that the genome can perform: copying, transpositions, reversals...
To illustrate, suppose (as apparently happens) a particular DNA stretch occurs over and over with variations: sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards, sometimes with 10% of the base pairs changed, sometimes chopped in half and sometimes appended to another stretch, etc. Should we then count all but one of these occurrences as “junk”? Of course, we could measure the number of bits using our knowledge of how the sequence actually arose (“first stretch X was copied Y times, then the copies were modified as follows...”). But the more such knowledge we bring in, the further we get from the biologist’s concept of information and the closer to the Platonic mathematical concept.
Eliezer, so long an organism’s fitness depends on interactions between many different base pairs, the effect can be as if some of the base pairs are logically determined by others.
Also, unless I’m mistaken there are some logical operations that the genome can perform: copying, transpositions, reversals...
To illustrate, suppose (as apparently happens) a particular DNA stretch occurs over and over with variations: sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards, sometimes with 10% of the base pairs changed, sometimes chopped in half and sometimes appended to another stretch, etc. Should we then count all but one of these occurrences as “junk”? Of course, we could measure the number of bits using our knowledge of how the sequence actually arose (“first stretch X was copied Y times, then the copies were modified as follows...”). But the more such knowledge we bring in, the further we get from the biologist’s concept of information and the closer to the Platonic mathematical concept.